British Working Research Articles

India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World by Jagjeet Lally

Reviewed by: India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World by Jagjeet Lally Xinru Liu India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World. By jagjeet lally. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xv + 414 pp. ISBN 9780197581070. $74.00. Jagjeet Lally's India and the Silk Roads examines the world of caravan trade networks in the most intriguing but least understood commercial corridor, namely from Sindh and Punjab of Pakistan, to Kabul in Afghanistan, and to Bukhara in Uzbekistan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because this caravan trade arena entangled with economic and power rivalries of inner Eurasia, that is, the Great Game, and faced competition with the high tide of global maritime trade, the history of caravan trade is much more than caravan trade per se, but also displays how the people—traders, kings, peasants, bandits, mercenaries—coped with the changing world around them and took opportunities to develop their networks and reap profits. Nevertheless, they eventually abandoned the caravan trade as their main livelihood and submerged in the new order created by the British and Russian imperial expansions. The Introduction set up the landscape of the caravan trade in the context of the Silk Roads connecting Indian subcontinent to Central Asia including south Russia. The author rebuts the general assumption that maritime trade arose since 1500 suffocated the ancient inland trade of the Silk Roads. The British Empire was a sea power and maritime trade was the tool of exerting its power to India. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire conquered Kazakh hordes and Tajik khans on the [End Page 527] steppe, colonized Samarkand and Bukhara thus drove away Indian traders there. Caravan trade from Multan to Bukhara did slow down and the space of their practices was limited. However, as the essential goods for the trade, including horses, cotton cloth, indigo, silk yarn, were rooted in the ecological differences between the dry zone composed of the high lands and Central Asia Oasis and the wet zone of India, the caravan trade made adjustments to the changing environment to ply their trade in the early modern era. The eight chapters of the book present analyses of eight aspects, or, variables, of the caravan trade. They are environment, exchanges, power, traders, material culture, colonial conquest, knowledge, and technology. The time spans of each chapter overlapped but the narrative moves down the time to the end of the caravan trade in this area. As every aspect of the caravan trade is complicated story itself, digestion of each variable reveals intimate knowledge of the caravan trade world. Take the chapter 4 on traders. Firms of caravans and money lenders were Paithan, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Kabuli, Multani, Shikaruri, etc. Here identities of ethnic, religion, and locality overlapped and shifted. Meanwhile sufi saints meditate tensions in the trade world. Neither British nor Russian ethnographic works in their effort to pin down the identifications of those people caught the sophistication and complexity of the people operated there. Chapter 5 on material culture delineate the evolvement of fashion following political power shifts and religious changes inside and outside the world touched by caravan trade. After 1500, successors of Timur Empire in Central Asia portrayed themselves of man of letter and promoting arts and sciences. Muhammad Khan Shaybanid controlled Samarkand thus the region of Transoxiana during the sixteenth century. The lapis blue and Turquoise blue dominated architecture on mosques, madrasas, tombs of rulers not only in Central Asia, but also in Moghul India which exited from Central Asia to India. Equestrian culture permeated all the way from Central Asia to the Moghul court then to the courts of rajputs and the Silk king Ranjit Singh ruling Punjab in the early half of the nineteenth century. This royal fashion promoted a robust horse trade on the caravan routes. Blue fashion on attires of elite was the impetus for trade on precious stones for decoration and pigments. When the tide finally changed that India and Central Asia were no longer the producers of cotton textiles but the market for British and Russian looms in the late nineteenth century, the Blue dominance of color also faded. With all the efforts to get commercial information...

Editor's Introduction

Tennessee State University historian Andrea Ringer neatly situates the twentieth-century decades of the traveling circus within a larger framework of labor and industrial history. A large enterprise comprising as many as one hundred railcars and three hundred horses as it traversed the countryside, the traveling circus, says Ringer, might best be considered a “traveling company town.” Even as a few owners like Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers had generally consolidated control of the industry by the 1930s, their employees—an interracial and mixed-gender assembly of ordinary laborers and skilled specialists including sideshow workers who fought off their popular label as “freaks”—were organizing around wages and working conditions under various AFL actor and teamster unions. The distinctiveness of the circus workscape, defined by tensions between paternalism and class status and tradeoffs of work and leisure time, ultimately succumbed to a combination of mechanization and modernization, which diminished its exotic appeal. In 1956, the last road show folded its tents and joined the transition to indoor arenas.With a microcosmic look at the 1950 American Enka rayon workers’ strike in Morristown, Tennessee, Jennifer Brooks makes us think again about the real impact of the national Taft-Hartley Act, passed two years earlier. While several sections of Taft-Hartley are standard-issue features of labor history lectures documenting a turn away from the union-enabling message of the Wagner Act of 1935—including a ban on secondary boycotts and the permission for states to ban union shops—a lesser-known aspect of the new law, according to Brooks, proved pivotal in Morristown and many other workplaces across the South. When they recruited replacement workers, employers could themselves now file for National Labor Relations Board elections—elections under which the new workers could vote, while still-striking workers could not! Utterly averse to the intended spirit of New Deal – era labor law, the new wrinkle fit well into a changing era of industrial relations.Jeff Schuhrke assembles a revealing roundtable on the social conditions affecting the latest wave of labor journalism. Michelle Chen looks back on a century of the labor beat, highlighting an arena still short on “working-class voices.” Luis Feliz Leon, who struggled as an unpaid intern, laments the media preference for “pundits”—often fresh out of Ivy League universities—over working journalists. Dave Jamieson celebrates recent unionizing success in circles where it sometimes seems “a little strange not to be organized in this field.” Finally, Kim Kelly takes pride in negotiating the challenges of a freelance market where even Teen Vogue finds itself in need of labor coverage.Arts and Media editor Richard Wells usefully reconstructs the mixed reception of auteur filmmaker Mike Leigh's treatment of the Peterloo Massacre, a pivotal event in working-class history that also figures centrally in E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. As Wells relates with citations ranging from film critic A. O. Scott to historian Peter Linebaugh, Peterloo proved something of a Rorschach test for the art and ethics of working-class representation as well as the politics that connects 1819 to 2019.In his review of Nate Holdren's account of workplace accidents and the law in the Progressive Era, Gabriel Winant laments the fracturing of the field into separate vectors defined by working-class agency, the “cultural turn,” and state-and-institutional analysis. In doing so, he salutes Holdren for helping to “bring back” these too-often-separated projects “into conversation.” Fortunately, our reviewers suggest that synthetic and insightful intellectual forays also characterize other studies, including Erin Hatton's treatment of “coercion” as applied to such disparate groups as prisoners, welfare recipients, graduate students, and college athletes; and also the meaning of “disability” in Tracy Kinder's study of wounded Union army veterans. Among several other works worthy of special note, Kim Phillips-Fein calls attention to a Mike Davis/Jon Wiener blockbuster on radical LA youth in the 1960s, Robin Muncy dissects two big anthologies on the legacy of the New Deal, and Donna Haverty-Stacke touts David Witwer and Catherine Rios's insights about the far-reaching impact of the McClellan Committee's largely phony war on union crime in the late 1950s.Finally, having bid a fond adieu to Jim Daniels in the last issue, we welcome Labor's new poetry editor, Susan Eisenberg. In recalling the moment of workplace transition between a retiring staff member and her successor at a union office, “Renee's Bouquet” indicates how much individual gestures of kindness and connection make a difference in our lives.

USSR’s Policy Towards the Kurds of Turkey, 1945-1960

This study aims to determine the policy of the USSR toward the Kurds of Türkiye between the years 1945-1960. For this purpose, data were collected from archival documents, photographs, maps, videos, and Turkish, Russian, and English works. The study tests the hypothesis that the main reason for the change in the USSR’s policy towards the Kurds of Türkiye was the victorious emergence of the USSR from World War II. It has been determined that the demands of the victorious USSR from Türkiye and the USSR-West struggle influenced the policy of the USSR towards the Kurds of Türkiye. Depending on the course of the rivalry between the USSR and the West in Iran, Greece, Iraq and Syria, the situation of benefiting from the countries has emerged in implementing the USSR’s policy towards the Kurds of Türkiye. As a result, after the demands of the USSR, the rulers of the Republic of Türkiye directed the country toward the West. Despite the USSR’s renunciation of the demands, the rulers of the Republic of Türkiye continued to remain in the Western camp. For these reasons, it has been determined that the USSR tried to take advantage of the Kurds in Türkiye and other countries against Türkiye and the West.

Collectors, class and conflict at the lower palaeolithic discovery at Stoke Newington, 1878-1884

ABSTRACT This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic ‘living floor’ at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have introduced and the value of this archaeology to their own lives and livelihoods.

Tu Er Dai Peasant Landlords and the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Guangzhou's Urban Villages

Abstract This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. E. P. Thompson's classic text, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the formation of class consciousness as historically embedded within cultural meanings, qualitative conditions of industrialization, and agency of the working people. The case of the tu er dai, however, lays bare how the historical unmaking of the Maoist peasant classes entails the emaciation of rural populations, as Yan Hairong has described, through the intensified extraction and exploitation of the migrant classes. The tu er dai is a place-based group of former peasants who have quickly elevated to the rentier class thanks to their collective possession of use rights to village land. By remaining suspended between the spatial and subjective designations of the rural and the urban, village members find themselves strategically stalling negotiations with the municipal government in the selling of their use rights via the corporate lineage. Meanwhile, they intensify the predatory extraction of rent and fees from migrant laborers so as to navigate the dilemmas associated with state-endorsed projects of displacement and development. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.

Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson (2022). Organisational Misbehaviour

It started with an article with the ingenious title ‘All quiet on the workplace front?’. Here, Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd (1995) criticized the dominant types of analyses of work organizations in British working life studies of that time. In these studies, they pointed out that workers had disappeared as agents of workplace life, which was the quiet to which they alluded. According to much of the sociology of work, management had succeeded not only in subjecting workers to total control, but also in turning them into self-controlling dopes of company cultures. Already in Thompson and Ackroyd’s critique, we find concepts such as misbehavior, recalcitrance, and appropriation of time and products – concepts that are further theorized in the first edition of their book Organisational Misbehaviour (OMB, Ackroyd & Thompson 1999). Throughout, the authors emphasized the importance in workplace life of employees’ collective agency through informal self-organization. Undoubtedly, this is the most important book in the field in the beginning of the 2000s and it had a huge influence on working life studies. The success of the book meant that many have been waiting for a long time for a second edition – and now it is here.

Needs Analysis of English for Fine Arts Study Program Students as a Basis to Design English Teaching Materials

This research aimed to find out English teaching materials need of Fine Art study program students in learning English. The quantitative method was conducted in this research. In collecting the data, the researchers applied questionnaires for the students as the instrument of the research. There were 16 students of Fine Arts study program in the 2021-2022 academic year as the participants in this research. The results of this research revealed that in learning English students of Fine Arts study program need all language skills and the mostly needed language skill is speaking. They need speaking because will support their future career as artisan art working in English. Regarding language components, mainly required by the students is vocabulary. In addition, teaching materials related to fine arts are needed by the students, as well the teaching materials are taken from internet. Furthermore, pertaining to the objective of learning English that is to be able to communicate in English, the students need discussion before beginning to learn English course. This method can support students’ need in speaking skill. These students’ needs can be used as the basis to design English teaching materials..

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Textual and Literary Criticism of the Books of Kings: Collected Essays by Julio Trebolle Barrera

Reviewed by: Textual and Literary Criticism of the Books of Kings: Collected Essays by Julio Trebolle Barrera David B. Schreiner julio trebolle barrera, Textual and Literary Criticism of the Books of Kings: Collected Essays (VTSup 185; Leiden: Brill, 2020). Pp. xiii + 462. €115/$138. Modern biblical scholarship in general and scholarly discussions from the latter portion of the twentieth and early portion of the twenty-first centuries have demonstrated just how controversial historical-critical investigations can be. Paradigmatic assumptions may not be universally accepted. Methods of application may be critiqued by, or used differently in, certain scholarly circles. In many cases, obstacles are constructed that damper any advantageous conversation. Yet, when redaction critical, source critical, or any other historical-critical investigation proceeds without the proper textual foundation, then the controversies become something altogether different. Debates about rival methods or antagonistic assumptions become debates over incompatible foundations. Julio Trebolle Barrera has made a career of pressing scholars on the textual foundations assumed by so much critical scholarship, particularly scholarship associated with the Bible's historical literature. In doing so, he has blazed trails in synthesizing methods and forced hard conversations. Sadly, however, his work has largely flown under the radar, save among specialists in textual criticism. While the reasons for this are many, the fact that a large portion of his research was originally published in Spanish (traditionally not a major research language promoted by doctoral programs) is certainly a contributing factor. Consequently, this volume functions as a partial remedy to this situation. Republishing older work in English (chaps. 1–16) alongside work previously unpublished (chaps. 17–20) will henceforth ensure that T.B.'s proposals about the textual foundations of Kings are more widely disseminated. The sixteen previously published articles are the following: "Recensional Criticism of 4 Kingdoms 25:18–19"; "Jeroboam and the Assembly at Shechem (MT 1 Kings 12:2–3a; LXX 3 Kingdoms 11:43; 12:24d, f, p)"; "The Alternative Stories about Solomon and Jeroboam (MT 1 Kings 12, 14 and LXX 3 Kingdoms 12:24b–z)"; "The Supplements of LXX 3 Kingdoms 2:35a–o and 2:46a-l and the Main Body of the Composition of MT/LXX 1 Kings 4–10"; "Redaction, Recension, and Midrash in the Books of Kings"; "'Kaige' Texts in the Vetus Latina of Kings (4 Kingdoms 10:25-28)"; "Two Texts for a Story of a Resurrection: 2 Kings 13:20-21 (MT LXXb/LXXl OL)"; "The Old Greek of 3–4 Kingdoms: The Antiochene Text 'before Lucian': A Revision of A. Rahlfs, Lucians Rezension der Königsbücher"; "2 Kings 11 (MT/LXXB/L): Textual Variants and Literary Unity of the Narrative"; "From the 'Old Latin' through the 'Old Greek' to the 'Old Hebrew' (2 Kings 10:23–25)"; "The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in the Books of Kings"; "Textual Affiliation of the Old Latin Marginal Readings in the Books of Judges and Kings"; "The Text-Critical Value of the Old Latin in the Post-Qumranic Textual Criticism (1 Kings 18:26–29, 36–37)"; "Samuel/Kings and Chronicles: Book Divisions and Textual Composition"; "Kings (MT/LXX) and Chronicles: The Double and Triple Textual Tradition"; "Textual Criticism and the Literary Structure and Composition of 1–2 Kings/3–4 Kingdoms: The Different Sequence of Literary Units in MT and LXX." The novelty and value of this volume will be tempered for those who are familiar with T.B.'s work; the sixteen previously published essays (listed in chronological order on pp. 9–11) constitute the bulk of the book. The new contributions further develop established ideas and will prove beneficial for all. In particular, chap. 17 ("The Contribution of the Old [End Page 531] Latin to the Reconstruction of the Old Greek of Judges and Kings: 'Doublets' and 'Additions' of the Antiochene Text Missing in the Old Latin") focuses on the Book of Judges with a specific question of how the Old Latin tradition aids the reconstruction of the Old Greek behind Judges and Kings. Chapter 18 ("The Old Greek of Kings Preserved in Recent Witnesses: Manuscripts 158 and 56–246, the Marginal Readings of the Syro-Hexaplaric Text and the Syriac Text...

Agnieszka Wisła and the Blue Army: The Efforts of Polish Women in America on Behalf of the Polish Volunteers and Veterans of World War I [Agnieszka Wisła i działalność Polek w Ameryce na rzecz ochotników i weteranów Błękitnej Armii

<i>Agnieszka Wisła and the Blue Army: The Efforts of Polish Women in America on Behalf of the Polish Volunteers and Veterans of World War I</i> [Agnieszka Wisła i działalność Polek w Ameryce na rzecz ochotników i weteranów Błękitnej Armii

“It's the news, stupid”

“It's the news, stupid”

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

A Companion to Chivalry

A Companion to Chivalry

Interpretations of Ghalib

“Ghalib: A Critical Appreciation of His Poetry and Life” written by Dr Syed Abdul Latif and published in 1928, is the first regular work in English on Mirza Ghalib. In this book, Dr Latif has tried to examine Ghalib's poetry in the context of English poetry. Later on, “The Life and Odes of Ghalib” by Abdullah Anwar Beg was published in 1940, along with Ghalib’s biography and the translation of his selected poems.&#x0D; “Interpretations of Ghalib” is the book, which for the first time consciously presents the translation of selected poems of Diwan-e-Ghalib.&#x0D; This article critically evaluates "Interpretations of Ghalib" by J. L. Kaul. It was published by Atama Ram &amp; Sons, Dehli, in 1957. In these interpretations, 326 (three hundred and twenty-six) verses have been selected from Ghalib’s Poetry. These selections are interpreted under the themes of Interrogation, One Art, One Life, One Love, etc. The book is significant as it contains only the selected renderings, not a biography. As far as the quality of these translations is concerned, the book under review is not a good example.&#x0D; In “Interpretations of Ghalib”, Pandit Jayalal Kaul has tried to make hin interpretations of the name of Ghalib. To what extent have these interpretations succeeded in representing the source text? An analysis of this will be provided in this article with examples. Kaul has not limited himself to translation, but has also added a lot to clarify the idea, and has expanded and even amended the meanings. J. L. Kaul failed to transmit the style and meanings of Ghalib's poetry effectively.

Southeast Asian Literature in English: Gender and Political Issues in Laotian, Burmese and Vietnamese Short Stories

In teaching Southeast Asian literature in English in Thailand, a lecturer presented a brief historical background of each country. After lecturing on each country’s literature background, the students were assigned to write the reflection essays on short stories studied in class. Then, a lecturer summarized the issues discussed in class and from students’ reflection essays. This article is resulted from the case study of teaching modern Southeast Asian Literary Works in English at IAC international studies ASEAN-CHINA program, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat university, Thailand. A lecturer and students discovered gender and political issues in Laotian, Burmese and Vietnamese short stories. Laotian and Vietnamese short stories A Bar at the Edge of Cemetery and The Khaki Coat represent writers’ attitudes towards their communist/socialist government. Laos and Vietnam share social problems such as poverty-famine, economic inequality and class struggle. Additionally, Laotian, Burmese and Vietnamese short stories also portray gender issues such as gender inequality, women’s liberation movements, and the effects of war on women.

Tri Lingual Categorization of Opinions on Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies: An Islamic Perspective

Bitcoin and other Virtual currencies (which are called “crypto currencies”) have been very popular during the last few years. Specially, in case of Bitcoin which became a hot topic on media when its price surged to $20,000 in 2017. People rushed towards it and tried to buy as much as they can. Muslim people started asking scholars about the Shariah guidance. That was a very new technology and scholars and legislators, both knew very little about them. Also there were many points which have to be considered before issuing Fatwa (Shariah guidance) like nature of money and its status according to Shariah, status of a money which have no guarantee or support from a government, possibility of fraud and hacking in these currencies and uncertainty if invested in them etc. Due to these points and difference of research results scholar have different opinions. The aim of this study is to collect popular opinions from Arabic, Urdu and English work and categorize their result so it can be easy to do more work on this topic.

Revival of classic Affixes in Spanish through English

The increasing impact of English upon Spanish pervades not only its lexicon, but also its morphology. The goal of the article is to see if the revival of several affixes in Spanish is likely due to English influence. These affixes, available in the classic languages, have mainly come down to us through Latin, even though some of them are Greek in origin. This article focuses on the revival of several of these classic affixes that are highly productive in Present-Day Spanish. The data have been retrieved from a corpus containing twenty-first-century written texts in European Spanish and have been compared to information from other corpora and several lexicographic works both in English and Spanish. The resources that are mentioned enable the chronological order of the recording of the items to be traced. This timeline will help to establish the influence of the English lexical units in the coinage of their Spanish counterparts.

Vaktsyna Rudolfa Vaiglia u borotbi z vysypnym epidemichnym tyfom

Introduction. Vaccination has made a breakthrough in history by overcoming the infectious diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia. The twentieth century was marked by the invention of vaccines against epidemics typhus, which have become the only salvation in overcoming this disease. The history of the vaccine was developed on the example of the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus, developed by a prominent Polish scientist, professor at the University of Lviv Rudolf Weigl, the history of vaccine development and the method of culturing R. Prowazekii in the intestine of Pediculus humanus corporis was studied. From Rickettsia Рrowazekii – the causative agent of epidemic typhus transmitted by aphids (Pediculus humanus corporis) in the history of mankind killed more people than in all known wars. Brazilian researcher Enrique da Rocha Lima differentiated described in detail and gave a specific name to the causative agent of typhus in 1916. In 1920, GW Epstein, as well as S. Burt Weilbach, John L. Todd and FW Palfrey in 1922 confirmed the etiological significance of R. Prowazekii in the presence of typhus. Biological and morphological characteristics, the life cycle of the pathogen and the impossibility of reproduction on artificial nutrient media were established. The aim of the study. According to the study of scientific sources to investigate the history of the technology of R. Weigl vaccine against epidemic typhus from its first series obtained in the laboratory and from 1930, when its production began, the period covering the 20-30s of the twentieth century. To establish that the scientific achievements of the scientists are not only the history of microbiology and virology, it is relevant today. Materials and methods. Content analysis, a method of systematic analysis of research on the typhus vaccine, was used. The implementation of scientific research began with a retrospective analysis of the scientific works of R. Weigl and his students. Selection of sources was carried out in the archives and scientific libraries of Lviv and the Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene of Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University, in scientometric databases PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, Google Scholar by keywords: lice, typhus, rubella, R. Prowazekii. 174 scientific works in English, Ukrainian, Polish, French and Russian were analyzed and sources were selected in which the issue of creating a vaccine against typhus, technology of its production, efficiency of application was covered. Results. The vaccine, developed by Professor Rudolf Weigl, author of the method of cultivating and accumulating the causative agent of this disease – R. Prowazekii in the intestine of the laboratory population of lice, despite the complexity of its preparation, for over 20 years was the only immunobiological drug to control typhus. Conclusions. We should be grateful to Rudolf Weigl and his students, who have often studied R. Рrowazekii at the cost of their lives and developed a vaccine against typhus, which has killed millions of people on our planet. Vaccination with a full dose of R. Weigl’s vaccine does not guarantee protection against infection, but reduces morbidity, completely eliminates mortality and facilitates the course of epidemic typhus.

The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History by Andrew Chittick

Reviewed by: The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History by Andrew Chittick Keith N. Knapp The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History by Andrew Chittick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 411. $90.00 hardcover, $89.99 e-book. Andrew Chittick has written the first English work that provides a full overview of the Six Dynasties (Liuchao 六朝), comprising Wu 吳 (220–280), Eastern Jin 晉 (318–420), Liu Song 劉宋 (420–479), Southern Qi 齊 (479–502), Liang 梁 (502–557), and Chen 陳 (557–589). This bold, pioneering, and insightful book concludes that we should refer to these polities as the Jiankang 建康 empire, since they had the same city (present-day Nanjing) as their capital and shared numerous characteristics. Chittick's book furnishes a penetrating analysis of the Jiankang empire, covering its linguistic complexity, political culture, frontier policy, military affairs, economic trends, and popular religion, as well as its piety in Buddhism. This meticulously researched volume contributes tremendously to our understanding of the Six Dynasties. Anyone who wants to learn about Jiankang society and culture should begin with this book, a treasure trove of information that challenges us to rethink nearly all assumptions about the era: Chittick asks whether inhabitants of these six southern regimes were "Chinese," whether these states resembled regimes in the Central Plains, and whether large numbers of northern refugees had swamped the south; he questions the mistaken assumption that the Jiankang empire had little historical importance. Chittick intriguingly suggests that we [End Page 151] should view these southern regimes as more akin to Southeast Asian kingdoms than to polities in the Chinese heartland. Given the book's extensive scope and boldness, Chittick readily acknowledges that he intends to open up some debate. In that spirit, I offer some disagreement that in no way diminishes the outstanding significance of his work. The Jiankang Empire reframes our interpretation of the six southern regimes and their historical impact. Chittick rightly points out that, except for their cultural achievements, these states have been viewed as a historical afterthought. Chittick seeks to shed a different light on these regimes and provide them with a new name. Since these regimes shared the same capital and many similar features, we should recognize their mutual characteristics by calling them the Jiankang empire, rather than referring to them as six different entities. Demographically, the Jiankang empire was one of the world's most populous empires in its day. Economically, it was a commercial powerhouse that actively encouraged trade. Its merchant-friendly culture inspired the economic policies of subsequent states, including the southern kingdoms in the tenth century and the Song dynasty (960–1279). Politically, despite frequent regime changes, the empire enjoyed much peace and prosperity. According to Chittick, the Jiankang empire has been marginalized through the lenses of the modern Chinese nation-state. Since the Sui (581–618) conquered the south and "reunited" China, the Jiankang empire was a historical dead end. The problem for Chittick is that the concept of "China" did not exist until later. Sure, the word Zhongguo 中國 (central states) existed during the early medieval period, but it specifically meant the Yellow River Valley at that time. Indeed, as Chittick argues, we should view the landmass associated with present-day China from a larger perspective, by using Victor Lieberman's notion of "exposed zones" and "protected rimlands zones": exposed zones were subject to pastoral nomadic invasions, whereas protected rimlands were not.1 Hence, Chittick proposes that we conceive of early medieval East Asia as divided by the Huai 淮 River into two zones, a Sino-steppe exposed zone and a Sino-Southeast Asia protected rimland. [End Page 152] In terms of language, agriculture, foodways, and political characteristics, Chittick asserts that the Jiankang empire had much more in common with Southeast Asian kingdoms than regimes in the Sino-steppe zone. Jiankang emperors, like their Southeast Asian counterparts, were rarely able to hand down the throne to their chosen successor. They were "men of prowess" (pp. 173–74) who relied on their individual and charismatic qualities, which created short-term networks of clients rather than lasting institutions. Moreover, the administrative system that Jiankang emperors ruled over operated like the mandala systems of Southeast Asian states, where the...

『황폐한 집』의 구조 연구: 상호연관성의 주제를 잡아주는 도구

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is unique among his novels because of its structure: that is, this second longest novel by Dickens has two different narrators who tell us the same events and characters. One is a third-person omniscient narrator and the other Esther, the main character. The third-person offers the bleak and stagnant reality of Victorian London in the present tense, and Esther tells of events related to her in the past tense. Dickens’s contemporary reviewers usually saw this then-new characteristic a critical weakness of the novel. However, it is the very strength that gives the novel a status of one of the best literary works in English. The novel exposes the irresponsibility of the government and the upper classes toward the poor. Their indifference derives from a general idea that they are unrelated to the poor. In this novel, Dickens seriously criticizes this idea and encourages them to feel sympathetic to the poor, showing the interconnectedness of all the people and events that initially seem disconnected. The dual structure effectively realizes Dickens’s intention. This paper traces how the two narrators help develop the theme of interconnectedness. (Chungnam National University)